Artists Gay

Well, when it comes to ‘gay’, ‘queer’ and ‘art’, ‘bad’ all too often does a mirror-ball refraction, conveniently-undefined, between naughty, impertinent (all senses), misbehaving, failed, incomplete, unsophisticated, simplistic, polemical, substandard, abnormal, faulty, inept, wrong, false, fake, unsuitable and inappropriate.

‘Queer theory?’ he growls, proprietorially, ‘gay or queer art, and exhibitions, and art criticism, and catalogue essays?’ apropos Don’t Leave Me This Way and other such shows, ‘Hrrrmph. All been done before.’1

Now, the only thing easier than setting up a straw version of sign(post)ed-gay unitary-identity crude-identity-politics-placarding Minimally Conceptual 80s thesis art as queer, is to torch it with an undergraduate sleight-of-rhetoric. It goes like this (it’s a vanilla-Derrida sex position): you have a positive term (like straight, cf. normal) against which another is negatively defined (gay, cf. deviant), but if you reverse them and give primacy to the ontologically-minus term (out’n’proud gay art), you’re still in a dependent, reactive position, still defining yourself against the other, always and only in relation to it, forever referring oppositionally back to it, pinned in (or on) its diacritical map. Having taught himself this old trick, Rex, panting slightly, clambers on to the safe territory of structuralist abstraction, wagging a series of allegedly-irresolvable binaries behind him: subversion/convention, hermeneutics/aporia, identity/alterity. This facilitates two tediously familiar moves: (1) eluding specifics and contexts and praxis by defusing politics into a diffusion of abstraction (puh-leeease: the poor thing’s so poodle-hearted he flees the gay problematic for Kantian poetics!), and (2) eliding queerness in an undifferentiated conflation of Similarly-Differently-Abled-Art (including the full facile roll-call: feminist, aboriginal, post-colonial, etc.)

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